A Point Or Two From Ben Huskins Of Two Point!

Next in line on our g.g sponsors tour are fan favourites and personal friends of ours, Two Point Studios! Today we bring you an interview we conducted a little while back with Ben Huskins, design lead for the upcoming Two Point Museum! Earlier this year they announced their new game and the volunteer team has been abuzz with excitement - and despite our best efforts the team members from Two Point are keeping schtum, such a shame!

With no other options remaining, the only logical thing left to do was to get some info out of a team leader personally. Luckily they were more than happy to tell us a bit about the game and I didn’t have to waste any time infiltrating their headquarters! Relieved, I started our discussion largely in reference to the teaser trailer they showed at Gamescom earlier this year. 

First and foremost, how was Gamescom and what was the vibe over there from the fans, were they as excited as we are?

[BH] Gamescom was great! We had a playable demo of Two Point Museum, and showcased both the Prehistory and Marine Life themes within the game. It’s always a bit nerve-wracking the first time you open the game up for everyone to play, but the reception has been fantastic. The expedition system seems to resonate with everyone, and it was great to see people excitedly opening crates to see what they had discovered to add to their collections. We’ve had really positive feedback on the new creative customisation tools too - even in a 20-30 minute demo you could see people building up their museums in different ways.

I only wish I could’ve been there to see it! Fellow Guildford alumni Glowmade were there too, and the two teams spent a lot of time together repping our little town over on the continent. Having missed the demo opportunity, I dug a little deeper on the development process.

The archaeology mechanics from Campus were some of my favourite twists on the gameplay, did you know you’d be building on them so much in this new full game? 

[BH] We didn’t know Museum was going to be our next game when we first started working on the archaeology course for Campus, but the dig site system was definitely something we took inspiration from when we started discussing Museum. That sense of anticipation and discovery you get with the dig sites, and that urge to collect all of the artifacts - that’s a real pillar of Museum, so we took that core idea and ran with it. Early in Museum’s development we even talked about seeing your experts excavating similar to the Campus dig sites, but in the end that evolved into the expedition system, exploring maps, and the excitement of cracking open the crate when it returns. 

Speaking of acquiring new things, I'm particularly excited by how in-depth the new customisation appears to be, but how far does that really go?

[BH] Customisation and getting creative with layouts is really at the heart of the museum gameplay. It felt like a very natural fit for this game; you’re creating an exhibition space to wow and impress visitors. You need to think about the guest journey through your museums, where you want to put your best exhibits, your gift shops, guided tours, and how you want to decorate that space. In Museum we’ve got much more freeform building, less focused on rooms and more about laying things out in the corridor - it’s your choice how you want to section up the space. We’ve got partition walls that you can use to create halls and themed areas. You can customise each floor tile individually, and apply different wallpapers to different areas. There are hundreds of decorative items, many of which have variants to pick from, and a colour picker to allow you to really make them unique to your museum. We’ve got a brand new lighting system in the game too, which really adds to the ambience.

All the new customisation tools allow you to make something beautiful, awe-inspiring, and unique. But they also add real depth on the management side of the game. You can spend hours optimising the flow of guests through your museums, and fine tune how your staff move about the space too. You can add one-way doors to guide people through the museum, and staff-doors to allow your employees to take shortcuts, or create staff-only areas. And if you’re like me, you can create some sort of hellish labyrinth of gift shops and toilets to really torment the guests!

Some very Sims energy there, I have a feeling I’ll be lining the sole exit and/or toilet with donation collectors just in case the Stockholm syndrome sets in and my visitors (victims) decide to be a little generous once I grace them with the chance to leave. Or maybe I get distracted building an Atlantis-themed exhibit for my undersea creatures instead, but it’s good to know both options are available! I pursued a bit further about overall gameplay options. 

The single player mission-based campaign is, personally, my favourite way to play your titles. Does the world map and expeditions play into that?

[BH] Absolutely. Exploring the expedition maps is one of the key ways you progress in the game, and it goes hand-in-hand with the progression in your museums. We’ve revamped the structure of the game to make it less linear. In Hospital and Campus, once you got to 3 stars in a level, most people felt like they’d finished it and didn’t return. So in Museum, we still have objectives and a narrative, and you still earn star ratings for your museums, but you’re encouraged to jump between all of your museums, and there’s always a reason to return to each one to progress further.

A lot of your progress is shared between museums too - exploration of the maps, and knowledge about all of the exhibits you’ve discovered, for example. Found an expedition location with lots of prehistoric creatures frozen in ice? You can revisit it from your other museums and start adding prehistoric exhibits to your marine life museum, for example. Or maybe you encounter an obstacle on an expedition map that requires a high level supernatural expert - you’ve got the perfect person for the job in your supernatural museum! Ultimately your museums can collaborate to explore all of the maps, collect all of the exhibits, and establish your reputation as a world-class curator.

I have to admit I was very much a player that left my barely stable campuses behind the second I had completed the goal, so I am genuinely extremely excited to think about uniting all my various museums and trained experts together to explore the whole world! A supernatural museum sounds like one I’ll have a particularly good time funnelling all my resources into. We moved away from Two Point Museum for a bit so I could learn about some of Ben’s other work. 

You've got a long history working with simulation and technical design, how far have we come from those wandering villagers in Fable?

[BH] The villagers had quite a lot of depth really, with individual personality traits, opinions, a job and social life within the village. Most of their behaviours and decisions were based around their daily routine and job, or reacting to the hero - which made sense for a game focused on a player character. There's no point doing complex behaviours half a mile away from the player, so more of the focus goes on those reactive behaviours. Like telling the player they have a nice beard / outfit / Union Jack underpants.

But in a management sim game like ours, every character is constantly making decisions, their needs and mood are always in flux, and they have to navigate a constantly shifting landscape the player builds around them. Staff quite often have 10s if not 100s of jobs to pick from. Like the Poor old janitors, when there's 20 piles of vomit to clean up, which do you start with? Likewise, for museum visitors, they're constantly thinking about which exhibits to view next, which route to take, and whether they want to pop into the gift shop, or run away from those prehistoric bees that just escaped and look somewhat miffed. Later in the game you've got hundreds of characters doing this all the time, and the player is constantly messing up their plans by building walls in front of their face, or picking up the toilet they just sat on! There's really a lot of nuance to it, it's surprisingly complex, and during development the bugs are equal parts perplexing and hilarious. It's a lot of fun seeing it come together.

You worked on another sim game a while ago called The Movies, which has been described to us in another recent interview as extremely ahead of its time. Do you feel the same?

[BH] Yeah it really was. The Movies was full to the brim with innovations, it was effectively two games in one: the business sim of running a movie studio, and then the really detailed movie-maker tools. The sim game itself had a really compelling game loop focused on managing the egos of actors and directors to create successful films but the advanced movie-maker tools were arguably the biggest innovation. Machinima was relatively new at the time, and The Movies was a very powerful tool. Players really got creative with it. Some of the films were hilarious, some action-packed, some even profound. I still have a few of my favourites saved on an old PC. We built a whole website for players to upload and watch movies. 

It was incredible really. But being ahead of its time was perhaps a downside here. YouTube launched about a month after The Movies released back in 2005, and within a year or two it was the main place to share video content. If we’d made the game a bit later, players likely would have been uploading their movies directly to YouTube and other video-sharing sites, and chances are they would have had much more visibility. Nearly twenty years later, it’s nice to see there are still some enthusiasts who manage to run the game on a modern PC and share their playthroughs.

What dreadful luck! The curse of being a visionary, but it goes to show just how long amazing creatives like Ben have been bringing new ideas to the table in this industry. For Two-Point Museum, we were blown away by the breadth of options promised and the depth of gameplay put on show. In particular, one aspect of the aquarium demonstration caught our eye.

In the announcements last week we were promised that every fish has its own unique requirements. How much marine life can we expect, and do they truly all have unique requirements?

[BH] It’s true, all the fish have different needs! Not only that, each type of fish has different traits and behaviours. Found some clown fish? They’re great for keeping guests entertained. Found a lionhead fish (yes, it does have the head of a lion)? They’re very impressive, but put it in the same aquarium as the clown fish and it’ll eat them for breakfast. Do you want to make the children cry? There’s a whole roster of marine life discoverable in the depths of Two Point Sea, and they all thrive in different environments. Some will live happily together, others not so much. So you’ll need to pay attention to their requirements and traits, and organise your aquariums accordingly. And don’t forget to give your favourite ones a name.

I won’t Ben, you can trust that Scar and Mufasa the lionfish will get on just perfectly together in the tank and absolutely nothing bad will happen! The children will bear witness to a beautiful story either way. 

Lastly, perhaps a bit of a cheeky question but can we expect any more surprises coming up before the games release? Or any insights to what future content is planned for the game?

[BH] We’ve got plenty more to reveal in the run up to release. More museums, more exhibit themes and expedition maps, and more gameplay features. We recently revealed the supernatural theme. Venture into the netherworld to discover lost spirits, haunted items, and lots more surprises. If you’ve ever wondered whether the ghost of a caveman and the ghost of a yeti would get along well as roommates, this is the game to find out the answer. If you ever lie awake at night concerned that your toilet may be haunted, chances are it belongs in a (Two Point) museum. All of the exhibit themes have different twists, so we’re excited to reveal more soon.

Very exciting indeed! This one was a longer one than usual so thanks again to Ben for giving us his time and to the Two Point team as a whole for all the hard work they’ve been putting in. If you want to learn more you should hop along to their socials where you can keep up to date with all the snippets and secrets as they move closer to release, and remember to keep an eye on us as we ramp up the number of sponsor interviews in time for the fest in February!